Just in time for Lee Smith‘s highly anticipated new novel, Guests on Earth, here’s a chance to read her other wonderful novels — each with a FREE preview of Guests on Earth! —  just $1.99 each for the e-book. Plus Lee chose three of her favorites by Algonquin authors to share, ones from Robert Morgan, Jill McCorkle, and Michael Parker, and each one of those includes a preview of that author’s new novel. All for just $1.99 throughout September.

Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

Lee Smith is a “teller of tales for tale tellers to admire and envy . . . [and] a reader’s dream” (Houston Chronicle). A celebrated and bestselling writer with a dozen novels under her name, including Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, and The Last Girls, she is just as widely recognized for her exceptional short stories. Here, in Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger, Smith collects seven brand-new stories along with seven of her favorites from three earlier collections. The result? A book of dazzling richness. As the New York Times Book Review put it, “In al- most every one of [her stories] there is a moment of vision, or love, or unclothed wonder that transforms something plain into something transcendent.”

Includes a FREE preview of Guests on Earth.

You can buy the Mrs. Darcy and the Blue Eyed Stranger at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Google, and Kobo.

On Agate Hill

A dusty box discovered in the wreckage of a once prosperous plantation on Agate Hill in North Carolina contains the remnants of an extraordinary life: diaries, letters, poems, songs, newspaper clippings, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, and bones. It’s through these treasured mementos that we meet Molly Petree.

Raised in those ruins and orphaned by the Civil War, Molly is a refugee who has no interest in self-pity. When a mysterious benefactor appears out her father’s past to rescue her, she never looks back.

Spanning half a century, On Agate Hill follows Molly’s passionate, picaresque journey through love, betrayal, motherhood, a murder trial—and back home to Agate Hill under circumstances she never could have imagined.

Includes a FREE preview of Guests on Earth.

You can buy the On Agate Hill at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Google, and Kobo.

The Last Girls

On a beautiful June day in 1965, a dozen girls-classmates at a picturesque Blue Ridge women’s college-launched their homemade raft (inspired by Huck Finn’s) on a trip down the Mississippi. It’s Girls A-Go-Go Down the Mississippi read the headline in the Paducah, Kentucky, paper.

Thirty-five years later, four of those “girls” reunite to cruise the river again. This time it’s on the luxury steamboat, The Belle of Natchez, and there’s no publicity. This time, when they reach New Orleans, they’ll give the river the ashes of a fifth rafter-beautiful Margaret (“Baby”) Ballou.

Revered for her powerful female characters, here Lee Smith tells a brilliantly authoritative story of how college pals who grew up in an era when they were still called “girls” have negotiated life as “women.” Harriet Holding is a hesitant teacher who has never married (she can’t explain why, even to herself). Courtney Gray struggles to step away from her Southern Living-style life. Catherine Wilson, a sculptor, is suffocating in her happy third marriage. Anna Todd is a world-famous romance novelist escaping her own tragedies through her fiction. And finally there is Baby, the girl they come to bury-along with their memories of her rebellions and betrayals.

Includes a FREE preview of Guests on Earth.

You can buy the The Last Girls at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Google, and Kobo.

The Christmas Letters

In The Christmas Letters, three generations of women reveal their stories of love and marriage in the letters they write to family and friends during the holidays. It’s a down-home Christmas story about tradition, family, and the shared experiences of women.

As Smith wrote about the book: “Like me, you probably get Christmas letters every year. I read every word and save every letter. Because every Christmas letter is the story of a life, and what story can be more interesting than the story of our lives? Often, it is the story of an entire family. But you also have to read between the lines with Christmas letters. Sometimes, what is not said is even more important than what is on the page.

I wrote this little book for the same reason I write to my friends and relatives every holiday–Christmas letters give us a chance to remember and celebrate who we are.”

Includes a FREE preview of Guests on Earth.

You can buy the The Christmas Letters at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Google, and Kobo.

Going Away Shoes by Jill McCorkle

The foibles of the people in Jill McCorkle’s world are so familiar that we want nothing so much as to watch them walk into—and then get out of—life’s inevitable traps. Here, in her first collection in eight years, McCorkle collects eleven brand-new stories bristling with her characteristic combination of wit and weight.

In honeymoon shoes, mud-covered hunting boots, or glass slippers, all of the women in these stories march to a place of new awareness, in one way or another, transforming their lives. They make mistakes, but they don’t waste time hiding behind them. They move on. They are strong. And they’re funny, even when they are sad.

These stories are the work of a great storyteller who knows exactly how—and why—to pair pain with laughter.

You can buy Going Away Shoes at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Google, and Kobo. Includes a preview chapter of Jill McCorkle’s latest book, Life After Life, out this November in paperback.

 

Gap Creek by Robert Morgan

When Robert Morgan’s novel Gap Creek was published in 1999, it became an Oprah Book Club Selection and an instant national bestseller, attracting hundreds of thousands of readers to its story of a marriage begun with love and hope at the turn of the twentieth century. Set in the Appalachian South, it followed Julie and Hank Richards as they struggled through the first year and a half of their union.

But what, readers asked, of the years that followed? What did the future hold for these memorable characters?

The Road from Gap Creek holds the answers to these questions, as Robert Morgan takes us back into their lives, telling their story and the stories of their children through the eyes of their youngest daughter, Annie. Through Annie, we watch as the four Richards children create their own histories, lives that include both triumphs and hardship in the face of the Great Depression and then World War II. Much more than a sequel, The Road from Gap Creek is a moving and indelible portrait of people and their world in a time of unprecedented change, an American story told by one of our country’s most acclaimed writers.

You can buy the Gap Creek at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Google, and Kobo. Includes a preview chapter of Robert Morgan’s new book, The Road From Gap Creek.

 

The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker

Michael Parker’s vast and involving novel about pirates and slaves, treason and treasures, madness and devotion, takes place on a tiny island battered by storms and cut off from the world. Inspired by two little-known moments in history, it begins in 1813, when Theodosia Burr, en route to New York by ship to meet her father, Aaron Burr, disappears off the coast of North Carolina. It ends a hundred and fifty years later, when the last three inhabitants of a remote island—two elderly white women and the black man who takes care of them—are forced to leave their beloved spot of land. Parker tells an enduring story about what we’ll sacrifice for love, and what we won’t.

You can buy the The Watery Part of the World at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Google,  and Kobo. Includes a preview chapter of Michael Palker’s upcoming book All I Have In This World.